Sadie Ryan explains how
Polish immigrant children use "aye" to fit into the Glasgow vibe.
Key Ideas:
Through this article, Ryan explains how sociolinguistic research has shown people altering speech, or style-shifting, depending on situations of everyday life. As described in specific in this article, Ryan covers second language and how style-shifting appears in the use of a second language.
.
"When I compared the style-shifting of the Polish children with that of their Glaswegian classmates, I found that the Polish group at times produced more extreme style-shifting patterns: while the Glaswegian kids were more likely to use “aye” with their friends and “yes” with their teachers, the Polish kids were even more likely to do so. In other words, the Polish children were sticking more strictly to the use of Standard English in the classroom setting, and to the use of Glaswegian Scots in the playground setting."
(Ryan, 2019).
Jennifer Schuessler explains how
"Toxic" is Oxfords' word of the year.
Key Ideas:
Through this article, Schuessler explains how "toxic" has made its way to Oxfords'
Word of The Year. The word was chosen to reflect ethos, mood or preoccupations
of the particular year, but also to highlight that English is always changing
.
"Katherine Connor Martin, the company’s head of U.S. dictionaries, said there
had been a marked uptick of interest in the word on its website over the past
year. But the word was chosen less for statistical reasons, she said, than
for the sheer variety of contexts in which it has proliferated, from conversations
about environmental poisons to laments about today’s poisonous political discourse
to the #MeToo movement, with its calling out of “toxic masculinity."
(Schuessler, 2018).
In an article by Lauren Schneider, we learn how
linguists model code switching in bilingual speech.
Key Ideas:
Through this article, Lauren Schneider explains "code-switching", which is
the fluctuation between two languages during a discourse. Through the project
she is explains, she says that the goal is to determine whether the rules
that govern code are universal or vary based on the languages in question
.
"That (goal) requires a lot of computational models, because you have to
know what languages we’re dealing with in order to tag them properly,”
Bullock said. “In order to tag them properly, you need to have context
… the tools that we currently use just break down. So we’re working on
lots of different computational models.”"
(Schneider, 2018).
Bridget Alex breaks down
the ongoing debate over Neanderthal language.
Key Ideas:
Through this article, Bridget Alex breaks down the debate over Neanderthal
language, and presents information, evidence and recent data on the
topic.
"Did Neanderthals have language? Before trying to answer that, I should
admit my bias: I’m team Neanderthal. As an anthropologist who studies
our evolutionary cousins, I’ve seen plenty of evidence suggesting Neanderthals
were competent, complex, social creatures. In light of their apparent
cognitive abilities, I’m inclined to believe they had language. But
I can’t prove it, and no one else can, either. To date, there’s no
evidence that Neanderthals developed writing, so language, if it existed,
would have been verbal. Unlike writing, spoken languages leave no physical
trace behind. Our words vanish as soon as they’re spoken. The best
researchers can do is to analyze Neanderthal fossils, artifacts and
genes, looking for physical and cognitive traits considered necessary
for language. And even after scrutinizing this same body of evidence,
experts have come to different conclusions: Some say language is unique
to our species, Homo sapiens; others contend Neanderthals also had
the gift of gab."
(Alex, 2018).
In an article by our own Dr. Kirk Hazen, we are guided
from diction to rhetoric to writing.
Key Idea:
In this article, Dr. Hazen explains that over time certain jargon
and diction used can change and form new constraints due to the
context. With the use of modern technology such as the Ngram, rhetors
can search phrases and words to find the current meaning and use
of the term.
"Several modern word tools can benefit writers, and I use all
of these tools in my own writing. These tools include electronic
dictionaries, Ngrams, and corpora. Although there are several high-quality
paper-based dictionaries (I recommend the American Heritage Dictionary),
the benefits of an electronic dictionary are sizeable. Most importantly,
these dictionaries save time with easy searching. Even the dictionary
on my computer allows me to easily switch between dictionary and
thesaurus so that I can fully flesh out a word’s etymology (its
word history) and its regular ambience (the kind of context it
normally occurs in). With these qualities you can better discern
how others will understand the word. Keep in mind that all modern
dictionaries (and there are hundreds of them for different specialties)
are surveys of usage. That distilled usage is what the writers
need to understand to be fully conscious of their writing."
(Hazen, 2016).
In an article by Kumari Devarajan, we find out
the origin of the term, mmhmm
.
Key Ideas:
"Once upon a time, English speakers didn't say "mmhmm." But Africans
did, according to Robert Thompson, an art history professor
at Yale University who studies Africa's influence on the
Americas. In a 2008 documentary, Thompson said the word spread
from enslaved Africans into Southern black vernacular and from
there into Southern white vernacular. He says white Americans
used to say "yay" and "yes." As for "mmhmm"? "That,"
he says, "is African."
"When enslaved people spoke African languages, it often instilled
fear in Southern plantation owners. That's according to John
Rickford, a linguistics professor at Stanford University. He
says plantation owners worried that the slaves were plotting
against them. Because of that, slaves were forced to speak
English exclusively. The African words slaves did preserve
were ones that could pass as English — words that could "mask
their ancestry," as Rickford puts it. But because those words
sound like English, they can be difficult to identify as coming
from African languages."
(Devarajan, 2016).
Gretchen McCulloch breaks down how fandoms concatenate character
names in
A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Shipping.
Key Ideas:
“The first thing we need to look at is where the stressed syllable
is in each name by itself. We want to make any syllables
we use in the ship name keep their original stress, so that
the link between the original name and the ship name is as
obvious as possible.”
“Well, ship names are part of a broader phenomenon of blends
in English, from Lewis Carroll’s slithy (slimy and lithe)
to why we have brunch and smog rather than leckfast and foke.
But people don’t actually go around creating blends all that
often—one delightful study of English blends looked at 63
of them, from the well-formed guesstimate, mansplaining,
and sexpert to the baffling fozzle (fog+drizzle), brinkles
(bed+wrinkles), and wonut (waffle+donut). But while 63 is
quite a large corpus when it comes to real-life blends, it’s
nothing when it comes to fandom: there’s more than that in
ship names from the cast of Glee alone.”
(McCulloch, 2015)
Britt Peterson works in conjunction with Boston University
linguist Daniel Erker to explain
How ‘ums’ and ‘ers’ are changing Bostonian Spanish.
Key Ideas:
“Erker’s paper focuses on pause fillers, those tiny unconscious
blips of sound, “um” or “uh” in English. What he’s found
is that, as the city’s Spanish-speakers study English and
come into contact with different varieties of their own language,
filled pauses are evolving.”
“The folks who have lived 100 percent of their life in Boston
almost never use ‘eh,’ ” Erker said. “They have abandoned
that category and shifted to either ‘ah’ or ‘um.’ ” In other
words the pause filler—a stutter or hum you barely hear—is
introducing an entirely new and unfamiliar sound into a Spanish-speaker’s
sound vocabulary, changing the sound of their speech and
their range as an increasingly bilingual speaker. Erker thinks
that “filled pauses are . . . a gateway for the schwa to
enter.”
(Peterson, 2015)
A study from North Carolina State University on how
Appalachian students mask dialects in class.
Key Idea:
“Many participants said they felt they had to work harder to
prove to others on campus that they are intelligent and capable,
“despite” their dialects.”
(Dunstan, 2015)
Gretchen McCulloch gives
an explanation of vintage internet slang in relation
to today’s digital world.
Key Ideas:
“[It] taught me what grammar-angry websites still miss out
on: language changes, and that’s okay. Speaking informally
isn’t being incorrect or lazy, but a deliberate and equally
valid stylistic choice.”
“I’ve learned to analyze language for myself, to experience
the power and subtlety of internet language, to question
the hoary old shibboleths invented by misguided 19th-century
grammarians trying to make English into Latin. It’s because
I’ve realized that what we consider “professional” language
isn’t just a matter of boring, stuffy suits, but real ways
in which we privilege the voices of people who’ve historically
had the most power. It’s because I’ve found better techno-linguistic
inspiration than any usage guide: now I talk about language
as an open source project, a free lexicon that anyone can
edit.”
(McCulloch, 2015)
Harvard cognitive scientist and linguist, Steven Pinker, challenges
the grammar narrative brought to us by various grammar and
style guides with
10 Popular Grammar Myths Debunked by a Harvard Linguist.
Key Idea:
“Neologisms also replenish the lexical richness of a language,
compensating for the unavoidable loss of words and erosion
of senses. Much of the joy of writing comes from shopping
from the hundreds of thousands of words that English makes
available, and it’s good to remember that each of them was
a neologism in its day.”
(Pinker, 2015)
In
Dear Pedants: Your Fave Grammar Rule is Probably Fake,
Chi Luu discusses prescriptivism.
Key Ideas:
“It is indeed important to learn the accepted linguistic conventions
of the standard dialect for reasons of communication, clarity
and even persuasive style. But it happens to be a historically
privileged dialect and is not inherently linguistically better
than other, non-standard dialects of English.”
“Many of these pop grammar rules, that are still seriously
taught in schools and universities and even promoted (and
inevitably violated) in style guides, were magically pulled
out of thin air by a handful of 18th and 19th century prescriptive
grammarians. They’re totally made up grammar myths, that
somehow gained a superficial, high prestige status among
the public and are repeated as fact ad nauseam.”
(Luu, 2015)
One of our favorite linguistic bloggers, Gretchen McCulloch,
brings us the
The Back to School Linguistics Resources Roundup.
Key Sources:
Eight Myths About Language and Linguistics
How to Remember the IPA Vowel Chart
Meagan Campbell documents new developments in Canadian dialects
that resemble “Valley Girl” speech in
Sah-ry, eh? We’re in the Midst of the Canadian Vowel Shift.
Key Idea:
“’We’re in the middle of a transformation,’ says Paul De Decker,
a sociolinguist at Memorial University of Newfoundland. ‘Our
vowels are getting higher and backer in the mouth, and it’s
more widespread, more diverse than we initially thought.’”
(Campbell, 2015)
Britt Peterson of the Boston Globe converses with Yale linguist,
Jim Wood, regarding Bostonian English in his piece,
‘So don’t I, from Shakespeare to modern New England.
Key Idea:
“According to Wood, although the construction is often taken
as an example of a contronym—words that mean the same as
their opposite—it has a subtly different, rather complex
function. It’s often used to correct a false assumption that
you might not agree with the speaker.”
Maya Kaufman of CBS News reports on the growing need
for forensic linguistics in
Language detectives make the web less anonymous.
Key Ideas:
“Forensic linguistics is the application of linguistics, or
the study of language, to the law. Forensic linguists examine
language to identify patterns or distinctive traits in the
author’s style or decipher meaning and intention.”
“In this murky and often deceptive digital environment, proponents
say forensic linguistics may hold a key to unveiling who’s
behind malicious, anonymous posts by using the one thing
they leave in the open: their words.”
(Kaufman, 2015)
"When I compared the style-shifting of the Polish children with that of their Glaswegian classmates, I found that the Polish group at times produced more extreme style-shifting patterns: while the Glaswegian kids were more likely to use “aye” with their friends and “yes” with their teachers, the Polish kids were even more likely to do so. In other words, the Polish children were sticking more strictly to the use of Standard English in the classroom setting, and to the use of Glaswegian Scots in the playground setting." (Ryan, 2019).
Key Ideas:
Through this article, Schuessler explains how "toxic" has made its way to Oxfords' Word of The Year. The word was chosen to reflect ethos, mood or preoccupations of the particular year, but also to highlight that English is always changing .
"Katherine Connor Martin, the company’s head of U.S. dictionaries, said there
had been a marked uptick of interest in the word on its website over the past
year. But the word was chosen less for statistical reasons, she said, than
for the sheer variety of contexts in which it has proliferated, from conversations
about environmental poisons to laments about today’s poisonous political discourse
to the #MeToo movement, with its calling out of “toxic masculinity."
(Schuessler, 2018).
In an article by Lauren Schneider, we learn how
linguists model code switching in bilingual speech.
Key Ideas:
Through this article, Lauren Schneider explains "code-switching", which is
the fluctuation between two languages during a discourse. Through the project
she is explains, she says that the goal is to determine whether the rules
that govern code are universal or vary based on the languages in question
.
"That (goal) requires a lot of computational models, because you have to
know what languages we’re dealing with in order to tag them properly,”
Bullock said. “In order to tag them properly, you need to have context
… the tools that we currently use just break down. So we’re working on
lots of different computational models.”"
(Schneider, 2018).
Bridget Alex breaks down
the ongoing debate over Neanderthal language.
Key Ideas:
Through this article, Bridget Alex breaks down the debate over Neanderthal
language, and presents information, evidence and recent data on the
topic.
"Did Neanderthals have language? Before trying to answer that, I should
admit my bias: I’m team Neanderthal. As an anthropologist who studies
our evolutionary cousins, I’ve seen plenty of evidence suggesting Neanderthals
were competent, complex, social creatures. In light of their apparent
cognitive abilities, I’m inclined to believe they had language. But
I can’t prove it, and no one else can, either. To date, there’s no
evidence that Neanderthals developed writing, so language, if it existed,
would have been verbal. Unlike writing, spoken languages leave no physical
trace behind. Our words vanish as soon as they’re spoken. The best
researchers can do is to analyze Neanderthal fossils, artifacts and
genes, looking for physical and cognitive traits considered necessary
for language. And even after scrutinizing this same body of evidence,
experts have come to different conclusions: Some say language is unique
to our species, Homo sapiens; others contend Neanderthals also had
the gift of gab."
(Alex, 2018).
In an article by our own Dr. Kirk Hazen, we are guided
from diction to rhetoric to writing.
Key Idea:
In this article, Dr. Hazen explains that over time certain jargon
and diction used can change and form new constraints due to the
context. With the use of modern technology such as the Ngram, rhetors
can search phrases and words to find the current meaning and use
of the term.
"Several modern word tools can benefit writers, and I use all
of these tools in my own writing. These tools include electronic
dictionaries, Ngrams, and corpora. Although there are several high-quality
paper-based dictionaries (I recommend the American Heritage Dictionary),
the benefits of an electronic dictionary are sizeable. Most importantly,
these dictionaries save time with easy searching. Even the dictionary
on my computer allows me to easily switch between dictionary and
thesaurus so that I can fully flesh out a word’s etymology (its
word history) and its regular ambience (the kind of context it
normally occurs in). With these qualities you can better discern
how others will understand the word. Keep in mind that all modern
dictionaries (and there are hundreds of them for different specialties)
are surveys of usage. That distilled usage is what the writers
need to understand to be fully conscious of their writing."
(Hazen, 2016).
In an article by Kumari Devarajan, we find out
the origin of the term, mmhmm
.
Key Ideas:
"Once upon a time, English speakers didn't say "mmhmm." But Africans
did, according to Robert Thompson, an art history professor
at Yale University who studies Africa's influence on the
Americas. In a 2008 documentary, Thompson said the word spread
from enslaved Africans into Southern black vernacular and from
there into Southern white vernacular. He says white Americans
used to say "yay" and "yes." As for "mmhmm"? "That,"
he says, "is African."
"When enslaved people spoke African languages, it often instilled
fear in Southern plantation owners. That's according to John
Rickford, a linguistics professor at Stanford University. He
says plantation owners worried that the slaves were plotting
against them. Because of that, slaves were forced to speak
English exclusively. The African words slaves did preserve
were ones that could pass as English — words that could "mask
their ancestry," as Rickford puts it. But because those words
sound like English, they can be difficult to identify as coming
from African languages."
(Devarajan, 2016).
Gretchen McCulloch breaks down how fandoms concatenate character
names in
A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Shipping.
Key Ideas:
“The first thing we need to look at is where the stressed syllable
is in each name by itself. We want to make any syllables
we use in the ship name keep their original stress, so that
the link between the original name and the ship name is as
obvious as possible.”
“Well, ship names are part of a broader phenomenon of blends
in English, from Lewis Carroll’s slithy (slimy and lithe)
to why we have brunch and smog rather than leckfast and foke.
But people don’t actually go around creating blends all that
often—one delightful study of English blends looked at 63
of them, from the well-formed guesstimate, mansplaining,
and sexpert to the baffling fozzle (fog+drizzle), brinkles
(bed+wrinkles), and wonut (waffle+donut). But while 63 is
quite a large corpus when it comes to real-life blends, it’s
nothing when it comes to fandom: there’s more than that in
ship names from the cast of Glee alone.”
(McCulloch, 2015)
Britt Peterson works in conjunction with Boston University
linguist Daniel Erker to explain
How ‘ums’ and ‘ers’ are changing Bostonian Spanish.
Key Ideas:
“Erker’s paper focuses on pause fillers, those tiny unconscious
blips of sound, “um” or “uh” in English. What he’s found
is that, as the city’s Spanish-speakers study English and
come into contact with different varieties of their own language,
filled pauses are evolving.”
“The folks who have lived 100 percent of their life in Boston
almost never use ‘eh,’ ” Erker said. “They have abandoned
that category and shifted to either ‘ah’ or ‘um.’ ” In other
words the pause filler—a stutter or hum you barely hear—is
introducing an entirely new and unfamiliar sound into a Spanish-speaker’s
sound vocabulary, changing the sound of their speech and
their range as an increasingly bilingual speaker. Erker thinks
that “filled pauses are . . . a gateway for the schwa to
enter.”
(Peterson, 2015)
A study from North Carolina State University on how
Appalachian students mask dialects in class.
Key Idea:
“Many participants said they felt they had to work harder to
prove to others on campus that they are intelligent and capable,
“despite” their dialects.”
(Dunstan, 2015)
Gretchen McCulloch gives
an explanation of vintage internet slang in relation
to today’s digital world.
Key Ideas:
“[It] taught me what grammar-angry websites still miss out
on: language changes, and that’s okay. Speaking informally
isn’t being incorrect or lazy, but a deliberate and equally
valid stylistic choice.”
“I’ve learned to analyze language for myself, to experience
the power and subtlety of internet language, to question
the hoary old shibboleths invented by misguided 19th-century
grammarians trying to make English into Latin. It’s because
I’ve realized that what we consider “professional” language
isn’t just a matter of boring, stuffy suits, but real ways
in which we privilege the voices of people who’ve historically
had the most power. It’s because I’ve found better techno-linguistic
inspiration than any usage guide: now I talk about language
as an open source project, a free lexicon that anyone can
edit.”
(McCulloch, 2015)
Harvard cognitive scientist and linguist, Steven Pinker, challenges
the grammar narrative brought to us by various grammar and
style guides with
10 Popular Grammar Myths Debunked by a Harvard Linguist.
Key Idea:
“Neologisms also replenish the lexical richness of a language,
compensating for the unavoidable loss of words and erosion
of senses. Much of the joy of writing comes from shopping
from the hundreds of thousands of words that English makes
available, and it’s good to remember that each of them was
a neologism in its day.”
(Pinker, 2015)
In
Dear Pedants: Your Fave Grammar Rule is Probably Fake,
Chi Luu discusses prescriptivism.
Key Ideas:
“It is indeed important to learn the accepted linguistic conventions
of the standard dialect for reasons of communication, clarity
and even persuasive style. But it happens to be a historically
privileged dialect and is not inherently linguistically better
than other, non-standard dialects of English.”
“Many of these pop grammar rules, that are still seriously
taught in schools and universities and even promoted (and
inevitably violated) in style guides, were magically pulled
out of thin air by a handful of 18th and 19th century prescriptive
grammarians. They’re totally made up grammar myths, that
somehow gained a superficial, high prestige status among
the public and are repeated as fact ad nauseam.”
(Luu, 2015)
One of our favorite linguistic bloggers, Gretchen McCulloch,
brings us the
The Back to School Linguistics Resources Roundup.
Key Sources:
Eight Myths About Language and Linguistics
How to Remember the IPA Vowel Chart
Meagan Campbell documents new developments in Canadian dialects
that resemble “Valley Girl” speech in
Sah-ry, eh? We’re in the Midst of the Canadian Vowel Shift.
Key Idea:
“’We’re in the middle of a transformation,’ says Paul De Decker,
a sociolinguist at Memorial University of Newfoundland. ‘Our
vowels are getting higher and backer in the mouth, and it’s
more widespread, more diverse than we initially thought.’”
(Campbell, 2015)
Britt Peterson of the Boston Globe converses with Yale linguist,
Jim Wood, regarding Bostonian English in his piece,
‘So don’t I, from Shakespeare to modern New England.
Key Idea:
“According to Wood, although the construction is often taken
as an example of a contronym—words that mean the same as
their opposite—it has a subtly different, rather complex
function. It’s often used to correct a false assumption that
you might not agree with the speaker.”
Maya Kaufman of CBS News reports on the growing need
for forensic linguistics in
Language detectives make the web less anonymous.
Key Ideas:
“Forensic linguistics is the application of linguistics, or
the study of language, to the law. Forensic linguists examine
language to identify patterns or distinctive traits in the
author’s style or decipher meaning and intention.”
“In this murky and often deceptive digital environment, proponents
say forensic linguistics may hold a key to unveiling who’s
behind malicious, anonymous posts by using the one thing
they leave in the open: their words.”
(Kaufman, 2015)
"That (goal) requires a lot of computational models, because you have to know what languages we’re dealing with in order to tag them properly,” Bullock said. “In order to tag them properly, you need to have context … the tools that we currently use just break down. So we’re working on lots of different computational models.”" (Schneider, 2018).
Key Ideas:
Through this article, Bridget Alex breaks down the debate over Neanderthal language, and presents information, evidence and recent data on the topic.
"Did Neanderthals have language? Before trying to answer that, I should
admit my bias: I’m team Neanderthal. As an anthropologist who studies
our evolutionary cousins, I’ve seen plenty of evidence suggesting Neanderthals
were competent, complex, social creatures. In light of their apparent
cognitive abilities, I’m inclined to believe they had language. But
I can’t prove it, and no one else can, either. To date, there’s no
evidence that Neanderthals developed writing, so language, if it existed,
would have been verbal. Unlike writing, spoken languages leave no physical
trace behind. Our words vanish as soon as they’re spoken. The best
researchers can do is to analyze Neanderthal fossils, artifacts and
genes, looking for physical and cognitive traits considered necessary
for language. And even after scrutinizing this same body of evidence,
experts have come to different conclusions: Some say language is unique
to our species, Homo sapiens; others contend Neanderthals also had
the gift of gab."
(Alex, 2018).
In an article by our own Dr. Kirk Hazen, we are guided
from diction to rhetoric to writing.
Key Idea:
In this article, Dr. Hazen explains that over time certain jargon
and diction used can change and form new constraints due to the
context. With the use of modern technology such as the Ngram, rhetors
can search phrases and words to find the current meaning and use
of the term.
"Several modern word tools can benefit writers, and I use all
of these tools in my own writing. These tools include electronic
dictionaries, Ngrams, and corpora. Although there are several high-quality
paper-based dictionaries (I recommend the American Heritage Dictionary),
the benefits of an electronic dictionary are sizeable. Most importantly,
these dictionaries save time with easy searching. Even the dictionary
on my computer allows me to easily switch between dictionary and
thesaurus so that I can fully flesh out a word’s etymology (its
word history) and its regular ambience (the kind of context it
normally occurs in). With these qualities you can better discern
how others will understand the word. Keep in mind that all modern
dictionaries (and there are hundreds of them for different specialties)
are surveys of usage. That distilled usage is what the writers
need to understand to be fully conscious of their writing."
(Hazen, 2016).
In an article by Kumari Devarajan, we find out
the origin of the term, mmhmm
.
Key Ideas:
"Once upon a time, English speakers didn't say "mmhmm." But Africans
did, according to Robert Thompson, an art history professor
at Yale University who studies Africa's influence on the
Americas. In a 2008 documentary, Thompson said the word spread
from enslaved Africans into Southern black vernacular and from
there into Southern white vernacular. He says white Americans
used to say "yay" and "yes." As for "mmhmm"? "That,"
he says, "is African."
"When enslaved people spoke African languages, it often instilled
fear in Southern plantation owners. That's according to John
Rickford, a linguistics professor at Stanford University. He
says plantation owners worried that the slaves were plotting
against them. Because of that, slaves were forced to speak
English exclusively. The African words slaves did preserve
were ones that could pass as English — words that could "mask
their ancestry," as Rickford puts it. But because those words
sound like English, they can be difficult to identify as coming
from African languages."
(Devarajan, 2016).
Gretchen McCulloch breaks down how fandoms concatenate character
names in
A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Shipping.
Key Ideas:
“The first thing we need to look at is where the stressed syllable
is in each name by itself. We want to make any syllables
we use in the ship name keep their original stress, so that
the link between the original name and the ship name is as
obvious as possible.”
“Well, ship names are part of a broader phenomenon of blends
in English, from Lewis Carroll’s slithy (slimy and lithe)
to why we have brunch and smog rather than leckfast and foke.
But people don’t actually go around creating blends all that
often—one delightful study of English blends looked at 63
of them, from the well-formed guesstimate, mansplaining,
and sexpert to the baffling fozzle (fog+drizzle), brinkles
(bed+wrinkles), and wonut (waffle+donut). But while 63 is
quite a large corpus when it comes to real-life blends, it’s
nothing when it comes to fandom: there’s more than that in
ship names from the cast of Glee alone.”
(McCulloch, 2015)
Britt Peterson works in conjunction with Boston University
linguist Daniel Erker to explain
How ‘ums’ and ‘ers’ are changing Bostonian Spanish.
Key Ideas:
“Erker’s paper focuses on pause fillers, those tiny unconscious
blips of sound, “um” or “uh” in English. What he’s found
is that, as the city’s Spanish-speakers study English and
come into contact with different varieties of their own language,
filled pauses are evolving.”
“The folks who have lived 100 percent of their life in Boston
almost never use ‘eh,’ ” Erker said. “They have abandoned
that category and shifted to either ‘ah’ or ‘um.’ ” In other
words the pause filler—a stutter or hum you barely hear—is
introducing an entirely new and unfamiliar sound into a Spanish-speaker’s
sound vocabulary, changing the sound of their speech and
their range as an increasingly bilingual speaker. Erker thinks
that “filled pauses are . . . a gateway for the schwa to
enter.”
(Peterson, 2015)
A study from North Carolina State University on how
Appalachian students mask dialects in class.
Key Idea:
“Many participants said they felt they had to work harder to
prove to others on campus that they are intelligent and capable,
“despite” their dialects.”
(Dunstan, 2015)
Gretchen McCulloch gives
an explanation of vintage internet slang in relation
to today’s digital world.
Key Ideas:
“[It] taught me what grammar-angry websites still miss out
on: language changes, and that’s okay. Speaking informally
isn’t being incorrect or lazy, but a deliberate and equally
valid stylistic choice.”
“I’ve learned to analyze language for myself, to experience
the power and subtlety of internet language, to question
the hoary old shibboleths invented by misguided 19th-century
grammarians trying to make English into Latin. It’s because
I’ve realized that what we consider “professional” language
isn’t just a matter of boring, stuffy suits, but real ways
in which we privilege the voices of people who’ve historically
had the most power. It’s because I’ve found better techno-linguistic
inspiration than any usage guide: now I talk about language
as an open source project, a free lexicon that anyone can
edit.”
(McCulloch, 2015)
Harvard cognitive scientist and linguist, Steven Pinker, challenges
the grammar narrative brought to us by various grammar and
style guides with
10 Popular Grammar Myths Debunked by a Harvard Linguist.
Key Idea:
“Neologisms also replenish the lexical richness of a language,
compensating for the unavoidable loss of words and erosion
of senses. Much of the joy of writing comes from shopping
from the hundreds of thousands of words that English makes
available, and it’s good to remember that each of them was
a neologism in its day.”
(Pinker, 2015)
In
Dear Pedants: Your Fave Grammar Rule is Probably Fake,
Chi Luu discusses prescriptivism.
Key Ideas:
“It is indeed important to learn the accepted linguistic conventions
of the standard dialect for reasons of communication, clarity
and even persuasive style. But it happens to be a historically
privileged dialect and is not inherently linguistically better
than other, non-standard dialects of English.”
“Many of these pop grammar rules, that are still seriously
taught in schools and universities and even promoted (and
inevitably violated) in style guides, were magically pulled
out of thin air by a handful of 18th and 19th century prescriptive
grammarians. They’re totally made up grammar myths, that
somehow gained a superficial, high prestige status among
the public and are repeated as fact ad nauseam.”
(Luu, 2015)
One of our favorite linguistic bloggers, Gretchen McCulloch,
brings us the
The Back to School Linguistics Resources Roundup.
Key Sources:
Eight Myths About Language and Linguistics
How to Remember the IPA Vowel Chart
Meagan Campbell documents new developments in Canadian dialects
that resemble “Valley Girl” speech in
Sah-ry, eh? We’re in the Midst of the Canadian Vowel Shift.
Key Idea:
“’We’re in the middle of a transformation,’ says Paul De Decker,
a sociolinguist at Memorial University of Newfoundland. ‘Our
vowels are getting higher and backer in the mouth, and it’s
more widespread, more diverse than we initially thought.’”
(Campbell, 2015)
Britt Peterson of the Boston Globe converses with Yale linguist,
Jim Wood, regarding Bostonian English in his piece,
‘So don’t I, from Shakespeare to modern New England.
Key Idea:
“According to Wood, although the construction is often taken
as an example of a contronym—words that mean the same as
their opposite—it has a subtly different, rather complex
function. It’s often used to correct a false assumption that
you might not agree with the speaker.”
Maya Kaufman of CBS News reports on the growing need
for forensic linguistics in
Language detectives make the web less anonymous.
Key Ideas:
“Forensic linguistics is the application of linguistics, or
the study of language, to the law. Forensic linguists examine
language to identify patterns or distinctive traits in the
author’s style or decipher meaning and intention.”
“In this murky and often deceptive digital environment, proponents
say forensic linguistics may hold a key to unveiling who’s
behind malicious, anonymous posts by using the one thing
they leave in the open: their words.”
(Kaufman, 2015)
"Several modern word tools can benefit writers, and I use all of these tools in my own writing. These tools include electronic dictionaries, Ngrams, and corpora. Although there are several high-quality paper-based dictionaries (I recommend the American Heritage Dictionary), the benefits of an electronic dictionary are sizeable. Most importantly, these dictionaries save time with easy searching. Even the dictionary on my computer allows me to easily switch between dictionary and thesaurus so that I can fully flesh out a word’s etymology (its word history) and its regular ambience (the kind of context it normally occurs in). With these qualities you can better discern how others will understand the word. Keep in mind that all modern dictionaries (and there are hundreds of them for different specialties) are surveys of usage. That distilled usage is what the writers need to understand to be fully conscious of their writing." (Hazen, 2016).
Key Ideas:
"Once upon a time, English speakers didn't say "mmhmm." But Africans
did, according to Robert Thompson, an art history professor
at Yale University who studies Africa's influence on the
Americas. In a 2008 documentary, Thompson said the word spread
from enslaved Africans into Southern black vernacular and from
there into Southern white vernacular. He says white Americans
used to say "yay" and "yes." As for "mmhmm"? "That,"
he says, "is African."
"When enslaved people spoke African languages, it often instilled
fear in Southern plantation owners. That's according to John
Rickford, a linguistics professor at Stanford University. He
says plantation owners worried that the slaves were plotting
against them. Because of that, slaves were forced to speak
English exclusively. The African words slaves did preserve
were ones that could pass as English — words that could "mask
their ancestry," as Rickford puts it. But because those words
sound like English, they can be difficult to identify as coming
from African languages."
(Devarajan, 2016).
Gretchen McCulloch breaks down how fandoms concatenate character names in A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Shipping.
Key Ideas:
“The first thing we need to look at is where the stressed syllable
is in each name by itself. We want to make any syllables
we use in the ship name keep their original stress, so that
the link between the original name and the ship name is as
obvious as possible.”
“Well, ship names are part of a broader phenomenon of blends
in English, from Lewis Carroll’s slithy (slimy and lithe)
to why we have brunch and smog rather than leckfast and foke.
But people don’t actually go around creating blends all that
often—one delightful study of English blends looked at 63
of them, from the well-formed guesstimate, mansplaining,
and sexpert to the baffling fozzle (fog+drizzle), brinkles
(bed+wrinkles), and wonut (waffle+donut). But while 63 is
quite a large corpus when it comes to real-life blends, it’s
nothing when it comes to fandom: there’s more than that in
ship names from the cast of Glee alone.”
(McCulloch, 2015)
Britt Peterson works in conjunction with Boston University linguist Daniel Erker to explain How ‘ums’ and ‘ers’ are changing Bostonian Spanish.
Key Ideas:
“Erker’s paper focuses on pause fillers, those tiny unconscious
blips of sound, “um” or “uh” in English. What he’s found
is that, as the city’s Spanish-speakers study English and
come into contact with different varieties of their own language,
filled pauses are evolving.”
“The folks who have lived 100 percent of their life in Boston
almost never use ‘eh,’ ” Erker said. “They have abandoned
that category and shifted to either ‘ah’ or ‘um.’ ” In other
words the pause filler—a stutter or hum you barely hear—is
introducing an entirely new and unfamiliar sound into a Spanish-speaker’s
sound vocabulary, changing the sound of their speech and
their range as an increasingly bilingual speaker. Erker thinks
that “filled pauses are . . . a gateway for the schwa to
enter.”
(Peterson, 2015)
A study from North Carolina State University on how Appalachian students mask dialects in class.
Key Idea:
“Many participants said they felt they had to work harder to prove to others on campus that they are intelligent and capable, “despite” their dialects.” (Dunstan, 2015)
Gretchen McCulloch gives an explanation of vintage internet slang in relation to today’s digital world.
Key Ideas:
“[It] taught me what grammar-angry websites still miss out
on: language changes, and that’s okay. Speaking informally
isn’t being incorrect or lazy, but a deliberate and equally
valid stylistic choice.”
“I’ve learned to analyze language for myself, to experience
the power and subtlety of internet language, to question
the hoary old shibboleths invented by misguided 19th-century
grammarians trying to make English into Latin. It’s because
I’ve realized that what we consider “professional” language
isn’t just a matter of boring, stuffy suits, but real ways
in which we privilege the voices of people who’ve historically
had the most power. It’s because I’ve found better techno-linguistic
inspiration than any usage guide: now I talk about language
as an open source project, a free lexicon that anyone can
edit.”
(McCulloch, 2015)
Harvard cognitive scientist and linguist, Steven Pinker, challenges the grammar narrative brought to us by various grammar and style guides with 10 Popular Grammar Myths Debunked by a Harvard Linguist.
Key Idea:
“Neologisms also replenish the lexical richness of a language, compensating for the unavoidable loss of words and erosion of senses. Much of the joy of writing comes from shopping from the hundreds of thousands of words that English makes available, and it’s good to remember that each of them was a neologism in its day.” (Pinker, 2015)
In Dear Pedants: Your Fave Grammar Rule is Probably Fake, Chi Luu discusses prescriptivism.
Key Ideas:
“It is indeed important to learn the accepted linguistic conventions
of the standard dialect for reasons of communication, clarity
and even persuasive style. But it happens to be a historically
privileged dialect and is not inherently linguistically better
than other, non-standard dialects of English.”
“Many of these pop grammar rules, that are still seriously
taught in schools and universities and even promoted (and
inevitably violated) in style guides, were magically pulled
out of thin air by a handful of 18th and 19th century prescriptive
grammarians. They’re totally made up grammar myths, that
somehow gained a superficial, high prestige status among
the public and are repeated as fact ad nauseam.”
(Luu, 2015)
One of our favorite linguistic bloggers, Gretchen McCulloch, brings us the The Back to School Linguistics Resources Roundup.
Key Sources:
Eight Myths About Language and Linguistics
How to Remember the IPA Vowel Chart
Meagan Campbell documents new developments in Canadian dialects that resemble “Valley Girl” speech in Sah-ry, eh? We’re in the Midst of the Canadian Vowel Shift.
Key Idea:
“’We’re in the middle of a transformation,’ says Paul De Decker, a sociolinguist at Memorial University of Newfoundland. ‘Our vowels are getting higher and backer in the mouth, and it’s more widespread, more diverse than we initially thought.’” (Campbell, 2015)
Britt Peterson of the Boston Globe converses with Yale linguist, Jim Wood, regarding Bostonian English in his piece, ‘So don’t I, from Shakespeare to modern New England.
Key Idea:
“According to Wood, although the construction is often taken as an example of a contronym—words that mean the same as their opposite—it has a subtly different, rather complex function. It’s often used to correct a false assumption that you might not agree with the speaker.”
Maya Kaufman of CBS News reports on the growing need for forensic linguistics in Language detectives make the web less anonymous.
Key Ideas:
“Forensic linguistics is the application of linguistics, or
the study of language, to the law. Forensic linguists examine
language to identify patterns or distinctive traits in the
author’s style or decipher meaning and intention.”
“In this murky and often deceptive digital environment, proponents
say forensic linguistics may hold a key to unveiling who’s
behind malicious, anonymous posts by using the one thing
they leave in the open: their words.”
(Kaufman, 2015)